Professor and Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair Tiffany Ana López will present a dramatic reading of excerpts from Tomás Rivera’s classic novel, And the Earth Did Not Devour Him. In the second half of the reading, she will be joined by Carlos Cortes to share selected scenes from López’s recent performance script, “Civic Morality: Lessons about Education, Creativity, and Community Building Drawn from the Archives of Tomás Rivera.”

This special event is sponsored by the UCR Rivera Library and the Tomás Rivera Conference. For further details about the upcoming 26th annual conference, February 21, please go to: tomasriveraconference.ucr.edu

Dr. Tiffany Ana López is Professor of Theatre and Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in the College of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences at the University of California, Riverside. Her research, teaching, and creative activities focus on issues of trauma and violence and the role of the arts in fostering community building and social change. Her recent theater projects include a play adaptation of Tomás Rivera’s novel, And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, and dramaturgy for the world premiere of Josefina Lopez’s Hungry Woman. Her publication activity includes co- editorship of Chicana/Latina Studies (2005-2012), and her writing has appeared in numerous books and journals, including Theatre Journal, Art Journal, Oppositional Conversations and Performing the U.S. Latina and Latino Borderlands. She is a founding member of the Latino Theater Alliance of Los Angeles and serves on the national advisory committee of the Latina/o Theatre Commons and the editorial board of American Studies. She is the recipient of an NEH grant for work on medical narratives in the humanities and is currently completing her book, The Alchemy of Blood: Violence, Trauma, and Critical Witnessing in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production (Duke University Press).

Dr. Carlos E. Cortés is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Riverside. Since 1990 he has served on the summer faculty of the Harvard Institutes for Higher Education, since 1995 has served on the faculty of the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication, and since 1999 has been an adjunct faculty member of the Federal Executive Institute. His most recent books are his autobiography, Rose Hill: An Intermarriage before Its Time (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2012) and the four-volume Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia (Sage, 2013). Cortés serves as Scholar-in-Residence with Univision Communications, and Creative/Cultural Advisor for Nickelodeon's Peabody-award-winning children's television series, "Dora the Explorer," and its sequel, "Go, Diego, Go!," for which he received the 2009 NAACP Image Award. He also travels the country performing his one-person autobiographical play, A Conversation with Alana: One Boy's Multicultural Rite of Passage, while he co-wrote the book and lyrics for the musical, We Are Not Alone: Tomás Rivera –- A Musical Narrative, which premiered in 2011. He is currently completing his first book of poetry, Fourth Quarter: Reflections of a Cranky Old Man.